The Mighty Almighty

Gloriously treading the path of evolution, mankind has made phenomenal progress over the ages, with tremendous growth in many domains. From the invention of needles & saws around 28000 years ago; use of fibers for making clothes & bags around 26,000 years ago; cultivation of wheat around 10000 years ago to invention of the wheel around 7000 years ago, human race has taken giant leaps forward to enhance the extent of its convenience & comfort.

The invention of the spinning jenny in the 18th century, a not so distant past, perhaps heralded the Industrial Revolution. The discoveries & inventions carried the mankind from one milestone to another. The first long distance telephone call by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 was perhaps the beginning of a long journey to more advanced wireless communications. Scientists & thinkers kept on experimenting to spring up unbelievable surprises of various kinds. A series of stunning wonders were unfolded in the decades that followed the testing of the first light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879.

Understandably, people of the era would have taken much pride in the success of the first commercial radio transmission; first televisual image, first talkie, first anti-biotic, first operational electronic computer, first flight of a commercial jet & so many other firsts.

The human brain also demonstrated a darker side to its limitless quest for acquiring more power & capability to incredibly impact humanity. The creation of the atomic bomb & explosion of the hydrogen bomb a few years later, were the manifestations of the flip side of this great evolution of mankind.

The keen observations of the elements of Nature, the application of the intellect & the will to transcend the un-conquered barriers kept on prodding the human race to delve further into the mysterious realms. The un-satiable urge to explore the unknown put the man deeper into the sea with submarines & higher into the space with rockets, satellites, space stations & space voyagers.

Every success in demolishing a hitherto insurmountable barrier succeeded in making the human brain more agile & sharp. The heightened level of intelligence, the improved mark of confidence, the mounds of acquired knowledge & the soaring spirit kept revving at full throttle to unshackle the man from remaining constraints, to further unravel the mysteries of Nature.

The mystic functioning of Nature had always mesmerized the human brain. The adventurism to peep into this untangled functioning led to the birth of the first test tube baby in 1978. The inquisitive mind further directed the human curiosity to genetically modify the crops, create identical creatures by cloning, modify the characteristics of species by mutation & alter the weather conditions by manipulating the clouds. Again on the flip side, the lure of better profits unveiled a sadistic invention to outsmart Nature by chemically enhancing the looks & sizes of fruits & vegetables.

Incisively, just when the man seems to enjoy some hard earned superiority to pip Nature to the second place in the contest for supremacy, Nature stretches its limbs to unleash its powerful arsenal. When Nature chooses to exhibit its unparalleled might, more often than not, it throws up catastrophic conditions for the mankind.

The innovative & intelligent human brain also stores the painful memories of the calamities wreaked upon mankind as & when Nature turned on its side. There are reports of hundreds of thousands of people getting killed in Japan in the Kanto earthquake in 1923. Millions of people lost their lives in China to ravaging floods in 1931. The cyclonic fury killed hundreds of thousands of people in the then East Pakistan in 1970. The sweeping tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 caused millions of people in South East Asia to awfully wonder about the enormously devastating power of Nature.

Such disastrous Natural outbursts keep recurring, just the scene of event shifts from one part of the globe to the other. If it was Kashmir in 2005 where thousands bore the brunt of an earthquake, it was Myanmar in 2008 where a cyclone swept hundreds of thousands of lives. Very fresh in the memory is the occurrence of an intense earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, shattering lives of millions of people. A similarly huge number of people have yet to come to terms with the harrowing face of Nature, attempting to overcome the multi-faceted havoc caused by recent floods in Pakistan & China. For that matter, in the on-going year of 2010 itself, Nature has demonstrated its immense potential to intervene & impact the course of human life in different parts of the world. Be it the snowstorms in U.S.; flash floods in Europe; landslides in North Korea & China; cloud bursts & mudslides in India- Nature rolls by, leaving indelible impressions of its unassailable might.

Strangely, Nature adopts contrasting styles to remind human beings of their vulnerability, in case it chooses to show them their place under the sun. If it rains floods of miseries in some parts of the world, it squeezes the fertile land dry in some other parts of the planet. The worst heat wave & drought in Russia is not only sucking life out of mortals but also depriving the populace of their regular share of food crop, leading to shortage of grains & spiraling of prices.

Well, in this unannounced race for predominance, man might have conquered certain frontiers which Nature had been guarding for so long. But when Nature decides to show its hand, man runs for cover that none can provide. In those moments of desperate helplessness, when man realizes & acknowledges the unmatched power of Nature, the human eyes look upward in a gesture of assigning higher status & seeking mercy from the Mighty Almighty.